Open Your Eyes (1997)

Imagine if an actor's director like Eric Rohmer--whose films consist almost entirely of conversation between pairs or small groups of people--made a film that incorporated elements from movies like Dark City, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, The Truman Show, and Total Recall. The result might resemble Alejandro Amenabar's remarkable second feature, Open Your Eyes, which favors ideas over effects and offers twist upon twist with mind-warping agility. This film rewards multiple viewings, pushing the viewer toward one perception of reality, then switching to another until reality itself is called into question. Melodrama, love story, and psychological thriller combine with a dash of science fiction, forming a plot that is both disorienting and deceptively precise.

Set in Madrid, the story defies description, but this much can be revealed: young, handsome Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) is vain, rich, charming, and--following a botched suicide-murder scheme by a jilted lover--horribly disfigured. He'd fallen in love with Sofia (Penélope Cruz) but is now an embittered husk of his former self, stuck in a "psychiatric penitentiary" on a murder charge and hiding behind an expressionless mask. His reality has crumbled, but as the film's agenda is gradually revealed, we realize that there are other factors in play. Exposing that agenda would be a criminal offense against those who haven't seen the film; suffice it to say that Open Your Eyes takes you into the twilight zone and beyond, and does so cleverly enough to prompt Tom Cruise to produce and star in an English-language remake, Vanilla Sky. The 2001 remake, directed by Cameron Crowe, costars Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz, who reprises her original role. --Jeff Shannon Amazon.com

Watch this first!

Oh yes you sould really see this movie before you watch the "Tom Cruise" one. But I guess you've already saw the hollywood version of it. But if you can please watch this first! May 2, 2008

Great Movie If You Like Alternative Realities

This is a great movie I feel if you are fan of unorthodox ideas and stories.

I heard an interesting theory which is we can be reincarnated into any time period past or future or even live the same life over again to try to change something that we deeply regret.

This movie gets into some of those kinds of ideas.

I don't want to ruin it by saying too much more about the plot.

Jeff Marzano

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Man on the television

A wonderful, visionary film. Many reviews highlight this.

I just wanted to note that, contrary to rumors, I am not the basis of the Serge Duvernois/Man on the television character. Really, I am not! February 5, 2008

Open Your Eyes

At the tender age of twenty-five, Amenabar released the mind-bending "Eyes," later Americanized into the inferior "Vanilla Sky." A multilayered, nightmarish whodunit, the intense Noriega makes Cesar's psychic torture palpable, while Cruz personifies the ideal of feminine beauty--ephemeral, tantalizing, and just out of reach. This dark, boldly inventive film, accented with intriguing futuristic elements, keeps its audience engrossed and guessing until the very last frame. July 13, 2007

Okay, so I'm the one guy who didn't think it was all that and a bag of chips.

Abre los Ojos (Alejandro Amenabar, 1997)

Okay, I have to say this first: Eduardo Noriega is the male lead in the new Brad Anderson movie Trans-Siberian. I don't need to know anything else, because Brad Anderson is about as close to being a god as movie directors get. If Anderson thinks Eduardo Noriega is the goods, then Eduardo Noriega is the goods.

He's also the star of the much-talked-about Alejandro Amenabar film Abre los Ojos, which everyone and his mother complained was desecrated when remade in America as Vanilla Sky a few years ago. And while I can't find anything wrong with slagging a Tom Cruise flick, I'm not terribly sure why this movie is being held up as the gold standard. Maybe it's a relativity thing; I have (to the value of my sanity, according to friends) managed to avoid seeing Vanilla Sky.

In any case, the plot: Cesar (Noriega, who, did I mention, is in the new Brad Anderson movie?) is an arrogant, handsome womanizer who meets the woman of his dreams, Sofia (Penelope Cruz). Problem is, the girl he jilted for Sofia, Nuria (Before Night Falls' Najwa Nimri), isn't too happy with the arrangement. While offering him a lift home, she commits suicide by crashing her car, an accident that leaves handsome Cesar horribly disfigured.

Now, intercut with all this are scenes of Cesar being interviewed by a doctor, so we know there's a lot more to this story than we're being let in on. And that's all well and good, except that the movie keeps raising two questions for each one it answers. At that rate, you're going to be left with a whole lot of unanswered questions when the movie ends. And that's exactly what we get. It's not so much that the film is ambiguous, which it is, but it's that the ambiguousness of the ending is the part about which we can feel we have the clearest grasp on. There's an "as you know, Bob" character at the end to explain everything, but Amenabar has given us a very strong feeling throughout his tenure in the film that the guy is, quite simply, lying his tuckus off. And where does that leave us? (Knowing nothing but our interpretation of the ambiguous ending, of course.)

What we do get is some rather fine shots of Penelope Cruz showing a lot more skin than we've seen from her before, a handful of really good performances (including Noriega's), and a mystery that, were it to come to any sort of conclusion, would be a cracker. Now, I'll be the first to admit that it's entirely possible I missed some small detail that makes the whole thing make perfect sense, but until someone points it out to me, 'm still wondering what it is about this movie (aside, of course, from Penelope Cruz naked) that gets peoples' juices up.

And did I mention that Eduardo Noriega is in the new Brad Anderson flick? ** ½ December 21, 2006

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